Blockchain-Based Distributed Key Management Approach Tailored for Smart Grid

Abstract

Smart grid (SG) is a new technology which enables the electrical power grid to be efficient, resilient and less pollutant. The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the key components in smart grids that enables two-way communication between end users and the utility using smart meters installed at end users. Cyber security plays a fundamental role to secure communications in the AMI. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, key management is considered a challenge in the AMI. Unfortunately, most of the existing key management schemes adopt a centralized architecture, which depends on a single entity to distribute keys and update them. In this chapter, we propose a distributed key management approach to secure communications in the SG. First, a key agreement protocol between the utility and smart meters is proposed. Then, we propose an efficient distributed multicast key management scheme so that group members can manage the group communication in a contributory way. This is attributed to blockchain technology that allows a distributed peer-to-peer network in which distrusted entities can interact with each other securely without the need to a trusted intermediary. The security and performance evaluations of our proposed approach demonstrates its effectiveness and scalability by taking into account the computation and communication costs which are main concerns in the big data era.